The Māori KETO-nic

This is a picture of me when I was 8 years old, that was the first time I was put on a diet by my mother.

The most vibrant happy memories I have from my childhood are centred around a bulging table covered in the most delicious food.  The worst memories are me being told repeatedly that I am fat, lazy and greedy and to stop being such a pig.  The thing is, when I look back at the pictures to when, as a child, I thought I was a gigantic heifer I wasn't.  My fatness was the transference of my Mother's judgement.  It is easy to see why, now,  my mother was beautiful and tiny and I was a sturdy Maori kid with a square solid build.  I was not fat, but she believed I was.  So, when I was eight years old Mum put me on my first calorie controlled diet.  That was 1970 and now we know the science of low fat, high carbohydrate is wrong. Now we know for a fact that calorie control diets don't work in the long run and that anyone will lose weight initially but eventually they will put all the weight back on again and more.    

I am eleven and still being told I am fat.

 No one knew that putting someone on a diet like weight-watchers etc. was setting them up to fail.  Instead the dieter got blamed and shamed for having no self control. The shame of putting weight on again, of being perceived as useless because I couldn't stop myself from cheating still haunts me. I didn't cheat.  But I put on weight again. Then because people believed I fucked up, I eventually did cheat. Why not, they all thought I had anyway. And once I did that I was shamed more and put on another even harder diet.  
This  happened, over and over again. The suffering is feeling as if your body is letting everybody down.  Worse, that your body is someone else's property.
I was on Weight Watchers when I was eleven, thirteen and fifteen.  Mum actually gave me diet pills when I was eleven, which in those days was a derivative of speed (she obviously didn't know) and I didn't sleep for days.  
My mother was not being cruel, she was trying to do what she thought was best for me.  Everything she did was in line with the science of the time, how could she possibly know she was damaging my health?  
This is no different from any parent putting their children on strict vegan,  high protein, or stuffing their kids with junk food.  People do this to their children out of love, not knowing that they were harming their kids. It did harm me. It began my life as a yo-yo dieter with an ever decreasing sense of self esteem and laying the groundwork for a body and mind that would eventually fall apart.

Thirteen and beginning my transformation 
into a heifer